Oxygen in the air is very destructive to the quality of most food. Reducing exposure of oxygen from food is an effective method to preserve its quality before perishing. One of the popular practices of reducing oxygen exposure involves actively extracting air and mainly oxygen from inside an opened container. Simply capping or closing the container only keeps the air or oxygen already inside to degrade the food quality. Most commonly, bottles of partially consumed red wine are capped with vacuumable stoppers. The air inside can be vacuumed out by using either a manual or powered vacuum pump. There are numerous prior arts that detail various ways to accomplish vacuuming. This approach, however, has not been widely applied to bottles containing olive oil an in particular to olive oil bottles with a spout. In fact, there is a shortage of prior arts related to this subject. One of the reasons is that oil is viscous and tends to drip when being poured out of its bottle from a typical spout such as those that project straight up from a bottle's neck axially along the longitudinal axis of the bottle.
The typical pour spout prevents the use of typical vacuumable bottle stoppers in combination with a vacuum pump. Either the stopper or the spout is alternatively fitted into the bottle. When the pump is used, the stopper is used and when pouring fluid, the spout is used. Another reason is the size of the olive oil bottlenecks, which are not uniform and are typically larger than wine bottles. So stoppers for wine bottles do not fit or seal olive oil bottles very well.
Additionally, extracting of air from a food container typically requires the use of a vacuumable stopper, that has a one-way valve, and a vacuuming device either manually or mechanically. This setup involves three components: the container, a vacuumable stopper with a one-way valve, and a vacuum pump. When the container is a bottle, the user has to hold the bottle with the stopper inserted in its neck together with the pump with one hand while operating the pump's handle with the other hand. This practice is fairly easy when the bottle stopper is small and most of its body is inserted inside the bottleneck so all three components can be held by one hand leaving the other hand to pump. An example of this is the Joie Wine Pump Stopper, which is designed only for wine bottles without any pour spout. There's no reason or possible for the Joie Wine Pump Stopper to encapsulate the typical pour spout.
In the prior art by Bonich, U.S. Pat. No. 7,086,427, Bonich describes a vacuum pump, with a stopper, which has been especially designed as a closing means for closing the bottle while the vacuum pump remains with the bottle. Bonich's vacuum pump has to be pulled away from the bottle or yanked out with considerable force while creating an unpleasant popping sound. Another disadvantage of Bonich's invention is the difficulty of inserting its “closing means” into the bottle's neck since the one-way valve is hidden deep inside the pump. Soo's patent, U.S. Pat. No. 6,637,321, offers a cap and vacuum pump arrangement to be inserted inside a bottleneck with a means to release the vacuum. This design, however, has limited pump capacity and flexibility. Another vacuum pump arrangement by Schooley's, U.S. Pat. No. 7,743,796, details a bottle neck vacuum pump, which can be placed over a neck of a bottle and evacuate a significant portion of air from the bottle, which is power driven and expensive to manufacture. Another low-tech and unwieldy approach is offered by Michalopoupos, U.S. Pat. No. 7,395,942, which utilizes a bulb structure attached to a stopper to evacuate air from inside a bottle.
While the discussed references, do mention a pump and stopper arrangement, or a pump functioning as a cap, none of the references teach a vacuum pump encapsulating an elongated spout while the vacuum pump remains with the bottle as a cap.